MSI Wind U160 MSI was one of the first companies to see the importance of the Eee PC as a new category of portable. The Wind U160 is its latest response to a growing range of netbooks based on Intel’s low-power Atom chips. Yet can it break the ‘me-too’ mould and offer something extra? MSI Wind U160 A mighty wind? MSI's U160 MSI’s …
Oh, and this time, PLEASE MENTION THE SPECIFIC CODEC. Saying MPEG4 (as on the eeePC 1000-something test) is pretty lame.
To give you an example of why I ask this: my eeePC901 (XP) struggles over 720p H.264 (jerky) and won't play 1080p H.264 at all. In fact, VLC player is the only thing I have that recognises that these are an actual real video format!
So I figured my eeePC playing HD content was a no go.
But then the other day I was converting a video (MediaCoder IIRC) and watching a good looking video in MPlayer. The video, it turns out, was 1280x720. Or HD. Played fluidly, not a hiccup, with a fairly processor-intensive application running. The difference? The HD that worked was a DivX, of the H.263 ilk. I'd like to try to find a 1080p DivX to try. The 720p video is larger than the eeePC's display, but still, it would be interesting to try the 1080p for the sake of it...
"How do you expect a LiveCD to work on a machine with no optical drive?"
It has three USB ports. I think you can figure it out.
I'll echo the original statement: knowing how it works on a Live CD would be really, really good info. Makes the decision process easier since odds are I won't be keeping Windows Extreme Starter 7 Double-limited Edition on it for long. (Maybe I'd run it as a VM. :))
I picked up an MSI laptop, a few of years ago. I picked up a Toshiba laptop, to replace it with, more recently, one day when it wouldn't even boot up with the BIOS start screen. Having used a Toshiba laptop for an extended period of time, now, I'm a lot happier with how they've designed it, and I've become gradually more unhappy with the design of the MSI laptop.
I don't expect I'll be buying any more MSI hardware, at any foreseeable time in the future. Fine for them to stay on the market, I just want to avoid their products, honestly told.
Yet another boring, overpriced netbook that's infected with Windows.
PC makers, for the love of Dog, show us something different for a change.
P.S. It is a netbook FFS. You buy it because it is cheap and cheerful (well, that used to be the case). What exactly is the point of benchmarking it?
I bought my Aspire One for £175. It's got pretty poor battery life, it's a bit sluggish. But it does the basics. If I want more than the basics, I'll go to my desktop or a decent laptop.
£330? What am I getting for the extra £155 over my Aspire One? (Apart from Windows, which I don't want or need...)
Why don't these manufacturers include 2 GB instead of 1 GB of RAM, I wonder? Memory is dirt cheap nowadays. When I bought my Eee 1000HE a year and a half ago I also bought a 2 GB RAM module for it -- for the fortune of $15 -- and now I have a spare 1 GB module laying around somewhere. I'm sure the manufacturers can get much better pricing. And considering RAM is usually quite a critical component for speed and general responsiveness feeling, why not do it?
Indeed Martin, I paid the same for my Acer Aspire One and really top whack for a standard formula netbook is £250, anything above this doesn't merit any more than a 50% rating unless it has 12+ hour battery.
It happens to be the cheapest computer I've ever owned and at the same time by far the most used. It's been on 24/7 for nearly 2 years now.
I actually don't find XP slow on it. I just installed a ramdisk, disabled any background services I didn't need, use flashblock in firefox and in general it's as quick for everyday use as my main notebook. It's not designed for autocad and HD x264 encoding.
This is a review of a Windows-based netbook and is covered as such. If it was a Linux-based machine, it would be reviewed as one. It wasn't tested with Live Linux, but then it wasn't tested with any software, other than PCMark, with which it wasn't supplied.
As regards it not being a netbook, the spec of netbooks has moved on. Yes, they were once cheap and cheerful, but the generally-accepted spec is now for a physically small notebook, with low-power mobile CPU, generally sub-HD screen and no optical drive. Perhaps there's room for a sub-netbook category.
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